You renamed your SharePoint site last Tuesday. By Wednesday, every internal link across your news section, team-site wikis, and list columns still points to a URL that no longer exists. Updating them one by one through the SharePoint editor is not a plan: it is two days of tedious work spread across dozens of pages.
This guide explains how to bulk replace a URL across SharePoint Online site pages, document library columns, and lists in a single operation, and how to verify the results before committing any changes.
When you need to bulk replace URLs in SharePoint Online
Embedded links break across the whole tenant whenever an underlying address changes. Common triggers include:
- Site rename or URL change - renaming a SharePoint site changes its address; all pages and lists that embedded the old address now contain broken links
- Cross-tenant migration - moving sites to a new tenant changes the domain from
oldtenant.sharepoint.comtonewtenant.sharepoint.com - Organisation rebrand - a company name change often triggers a new Microsoft 365 tenant name, breaking every absolute URL stored in content
- Managed path changes - switching a site from a /teams/ path to a /sites/ path, or vice versa
In each case, the old URL is correct text in the SharePoint database, not an error you can fix by clearing a cache. You have to replace it with the new URL everywhere it appears.
Before running any replacement, an audit of which pages contain the old URL is useful context. The guide to finding and fixing broken SharePoint URLs covers that detection step in detail.
What Replace Master can update
Replace Master's find-and-replace engine operates across three content surfaces in SharePoint Online:
| Content surface | What gets updated | Typical scenario |
|---|---|---|
| Site pages (modern) | Hyperlinks embedded in page sections, quick links web parts, and text web parts | News articles and team site pages linking to a renamed site |
| Site pages (classic) | Wiki content links, page layout fields, and content editor web parts | Legacy publishing sites with embedded navigation or content links |
| Document library columns | Hyperlink column values and text columns containing URLs | Libraries where a "Link" or "Related resource" column stores addresses |
| SharePoint lists | Hyperlink column values across any list in scope | Project trackers, task lists, or link libraries with stale reference URLs |
One important boundary: Replace Master updates URLs stored as SharePoint metadata and page content. It does not open and modify binary file content inside Word, Excel, or PDF documents stored in libraries. Links embedded inside those files require the respective application's own find-and-replace tools.
How to bulk replace URLs using Replace Master
Step 1: Connect with an account that has Edit permissions
Open ShareMaster and sign in with an account that has at least Edit permissions on the target sites. For a tenant-wide replacement, a SharePoint Administrator account gives the broadest access. Contributor-level access works for document library columns and lists but may not allow editing site pages on classic sites with restricted design permissions.
Step 2: Open Replace Master and enter the search pattern
Navigate to Replace Master and enter the old URL in the Find field. Be precise: include the protocol and any trailing path. Replace https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/projectalpha rather than just projectalpha, to avoid accidental matches in unrelated text that happens to include the same word.
In the Replace field, enter the new URL. For a tenant migration, the new URL is the same path on the new domain: https://newtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/projectalpha.
https:// and one for http://. Mixed protocol references are common in content migrated from pre-2018 SharePoint environments.
Step 3: Set the replacement scope
Choose how much of the tenant Replace Master should scan. Options range from a single document library to a specific site collection to all sites in the tenant. For a post-migration or rebrand scenario where the old URL could appear anywhere, select tenant-wide. A site rename that only affected one URL doesn't need that breadth - scoping to the affected site keeps the operation faster and the preview list smaller.
Step 4: Preview before committing
Run the preview scan before executing any replacement. The preview lists every page, library, and list item where the old URL was found, with the location and the exact text that would change. Review it for unexpected matches: sometimes a text column has a URL in it for reasons unrelated to the scenario you are fixing, and a blind replacement would overwrite content you wanted to preserve.
Step 5: Run the bulk replacement
After confirming the preview, run the replacement. Replace Master processes each matched location in sequence, writing the new URL and creating a new SharePoint version of the affected page or item. When the run completes, a summary shows how many locations were updated across how many sites and libraries. Because each change creates a version, you can roll back any individual update through SharePoint's standard version history.
What to check after the replacement
A bulk URL replacement touches a lot of content quickly. Three verification steps are worth running once the operation finishes:
- Spot-check the highest-traffic pages. Open three to five pages that were in the preview list and confirm the links now resolve correctly. This catches any edge case where the URL pattern matched differently than expected.
- Re-run a search for the old URL. A second scan with the old URL as the search term should return zero results. Any remaining hits indicate content Replace Master did not reach: check whether those items were checked out by another user or locked during the run.
- Check navigation links. Global navigation and site-level navigation links are stored separately from page content. If your tenant navigation contained the old URL, update those links through SharePoint's navigation settings in the admin center, since Replace Master operates on content items rather than structural navigation nodes.
For organisations that went through a tenant migration, the corporate rebrand use case walks through a real scenario of updating URLs and navigation links across a renamed tenant. The URL replacement tools comparison covers how manual editing, PnP PowerShell, and Replace Master differ in scope and effort for the same task.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Replace Master update links inside Word documents or PDFs stored in SharePoint?
Replace Master updates URLs stored as SharePoint metadata and page content, including hyperlink columns, text columns containing URLs, and links embedded in site pages. It does not open and modify the binary content of Word, Excel, or PDF files. Links embedded inside those files require the respective application (Word's own find-and-replace, for example) or a scripted approach using the Open XML SDK.
Does a bulk URL replacement create new version history in SharePoint?
Yes. Each page or list item that Replace Master updates receives a new version entry in SharePoint's version history, just as any programmatic edit would. The change is reversible: if a replacement introduced an error, you can restore the previous version containing the old URL through SharePoint's standard version restore. The volume of replacements also adds to version history storage - a real factor for tenants already close to their quota.
How do I find which SharePoint pages contain a specific old URL before replacing?
Replace Master's built-in preview scan identifies every location containing the old URL before committing any change. Running the preview gives you a complete match list to review. For a broader pre-migration link audit, the guide to finding and fixing broken SharePoint URLs covers detection approaches including SharePoint search and scripted crawls.